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michelleclsunon Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

I went to Hackbright in 2012 and in 2013 started a kids coding education company First Code Academy (firstcodeacademy.com) in Asia, covering Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan today. We have taught over 4000 students since 2013 and growing strong :)

Hackbright paved the foundation for me to start my own company. Couldn't be more grateful for that!

michelleclsunon Year 1 of the Revolution: Complete Novice to Skilled Developer

"With the right person, the right curriculum, and the right instructors, it's possible to train a person in ten weeks to be competitive with a college graduate with a computer science degree, even for a position at a tier-1 engineering organization. Beyond that, it appears to be repeatable."

-- Well said. Hackbright has repeated this process 3 times in the past year.

michelleclsunon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2013)

Hi seferphier :) Are you based in Hong Kong too?

michelleclsunon Show HN: EssenceApp.com – Daily digest of your Twitter VIPs

What I found from using this product in the past few weeks is that it helped me re-engage with the people I missed their tweets, either by replying or clicking through the links.

Twitter also has the dailiy / weekly digest functions, but it's organized by most popular tweets (https://twitter.com/settings/notifications). Sometimes I just want to know what my cousin back home or an ex-colleague tweeted about, which is useful for.

One thing I'd like to see is to make more than one list, or be able to set email digest for some of my existing lists.

michelleclsunon Show HN: The simplest habit forming app that could possibly work

It looks great! My nexus 4 is arriving today, will definitely be one of the first apps I download. Good job!

michelleclsunon Why I dropped out of college to work on a startup

He made a good point here in eliminating unnecessary risks (for him, dropping out of college) by retaining as much optionality for as long as he can, and at the same time working hard at his startup. As an entrepreneur there are lots of risks in running a startup, a lot of which are not within the founders' control (traction, market direction, etc). Managing risk is an important part of managing one's psychology as a founder.

Leo's story is one of humility and gratitude - I have always found them(the Buffer team) as an inspiration not just because of their startup's traction (which can be unpredictable) but more because of their character, endless seeking of improvement professionally and personally, and passion in giving back to the startup community.

michelleclsunon Why have I failed?

Hi bcambel, big congrats to your courage and honesty - one of the biggest learning for me of being an entrepreneur is the humility.

Just a thought, you might want to think of yourself as "an entrepreneur that failed once" rather than "a failed entrepreneur". In psychology that makes a big difference in how we label ourselves. Relate the failure to an incident in our lives, rather than an attribute that we belong to.

Also, just curious, what made you decide to give up? What are your plans now? All the best.

michelleclsunon What do you feel sucks the most when learning something new on the internet?

Definitely. Meta-learning is something that's tough. Recently I enrolled into CodeSchool.com and there are lots of interesting sounding tutorials. I code in Python and want to be more proficient in web development, the problem I face is, okay, where should I start?

Another example is, if I learned programming in python, what do I do to get to the next level?

michelleclsunon Explaining coder's block to non-coders

Likewise. Flow is achieved with overlap of skills and a clear step by step path to a goal.

As a new full time coder, I experience coder's block perhaps few times a week at the job. I think tomasien's suggestion to write things down is very useful, something I've started doing and help me get through some difficult problems.

Specifically, it is helpful for anyone that is solving a problem whose scope is not clearly defined. Writing, instead of talking, helps to map things out and takes out the pressure in verbalizing an eloquent solution / interpretation, which usually comes a lot later in the problem solving process.

michelleclsunon Most lives are lived by default

Thanks for the link Ryan.

I resonate with the post a lot. Recently moved to the bay area, after spending undergraduate years in chicago, working in nyc, hong kong, beijing, I feel that where we live determines a lot of how we live our lives, and people we associate with.

I disagree with the comments here that the author is suggesting that happiness is a goal. He's merely, in my view, presenting the fact that we should strive to make difficult decisions on our lives before it's too late. Choosing where we live is one of the most difficult things to change, however, all changes can start small.

Two years ago I took a sabbatical from my finance job, and never went back. It was a zig zag path to where I am now, but I would say the inconvenience and uncomfortable situations are worth it. So many people tell themselves, I'll stay in this job / city / relationship for one more year, till I get more experience / savings etc. Making difficult decisions (instead of putting them off) forces us to clarify our values. We might decide in the end to never leave the city, or the job, but we are happier because we decide consciously to, not because we dont' have a choice.

michelleclsunon Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding

Yeah, it's a visible improvement. And it's now my daily routine to go to Hacker News and getPrismatic.com every morning! :)

One thing I missed was to navigate to topics from my home feed. Before I used to be able to on the right menu I think, now I need to click into my profile every time to go back to my subscribed interests.

It was useful to be able to view by topics because the home feed is a mashup of all topics (which can range from work to personal interest). Would love to hear your thoughts as well!

michelleclsunon Prismatic gets $15 million in Series A Funding

Awesome, very useful product, definitely one of the most relevant news aggregation services currently. The recent web redesign also enhanced desktop use as well. Congratulations team!

michelleclsunon Ask HN: What are good books for advanced topics in Python?

Thanks @tordf!

michelleclsunon Ask HN: What are good books for advanced topics in Python?

Thanks @poof131 - I'd like to go deeper into algorithms / data manipulation / social network analysis (for my job), and also web programming using python (weekend reading).

I'm currently reading Python for Data Analysis but feel like I can read about how to use a library but it's hard to retain specific syntax use cases if I'm not using those libraries immediately / frequently.

One book I really like is Collective Intelligence (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596529321.do), which has some good examples on social network analysis.

michelleclsunon Prismatic launches a full redesign and shares their awesome design process

Great! Big fan of Prismatic :) One thing I don't understand is that sometimes there's a dollar sign next to an article (eg one from Forbes.com). What does that mean?

michelleclsunon Ask HN: What would you recommend for holiday reading this Thxgiving/Xmas break?

Books

michelleclsunon Why aren't we all using Japanese toilets?

The best part of these toilets is not the washing function, which in Asia frankly not a lot of people use (I lived in Hong Kong, Beijing and traveled extensively across main cities in Asia) but the heated seats. Once in a ski lodge in Niseko, Hokkaido, Japan, after a long day of snowboarding, these heated seats really save the day - Japanese perfectionism at its best.

michelleclsunon Hacking Kids - Part 1

Thanks for sharing!

I'm curious about your experience running your own early stage startup and raising kids at the same time. (I was also inspired after meeting with Joel to start blogging!)

When did you start YouSites, was it before or after having kids? What was the reason behind that decision? As an entrepreneur and a new parent, what experiences have been most rewarding, and what would you have done differently?

michelleclsunon Why Codecademy is overrated and missing its target audience

I have the same experience as a student at Hackbright, a 10 week programming course. Prior to hackbright I took a lot of codecademy courses, but it never got me from newbie to 'yes I can do this' programmer. Yes, I can follow the exercise and figure out how to pass each quiz, however, I believe CodeCademy essentially suggests that you have to follow 1 way to do things to be correct, which is not how problem solving (and programming) works.

At Hackbright however, I found learning with CodeCademy to refresh some knowledge is helpful, especially with a teacher around to ask questions. Most of the time, the questions confirm that my solution is also valid, but it's just different from the CodeCademy answer.

michelleclsunon A Journey of Thousand Miles Begin With One Step (Or Summer)

I am relatively new to actively posting / discussing on HN (have been a passive reader for over a year now). This blog post is my attempt to share with the community what I thought of my experience learning to program this past summer.

There may be some people in the community that are considering attending one of the full time programming courses in SF/NYC, and I'm happy to share more here about my experience and answer any questions.

michelleclsunon The Data Science loop: the day-to-day work of a data scientist

Thanks for the post, I am starting a role as a data analyst soon and am curious to hear more about two aspects of your role:

1. How are the dynamics between engineering team, product managers and data scientists. Understand that LinkedIn's data team plays a huge role in creating and improving features (like People you may know), how is it like at Facebook, and in general other companies?

Engineers build things, managers make decisions, data scientists answer questions

2. What are the tools you use ( I see R mentioned in the thread), what books would you recommend? I mostly write in python, use D3 and gephi for visualization. Am also taking the Coursera course on Social Network Analysis (https://class.coursera.org/sna-2012-001/class/index) and reading the course book Easley & Kleinberg, Networks, Crowds and Markets. Thanks for sharing again.

michelleclsunon Pricing is hard. We need your help.

who is your target customer and why are they paying you? Does this save them time? Money? Make them money? Got any scenarios or customer sketches?

In addition to these questions, I'd also think about how to reach a point where customer feels a high switching costs. It seems that a service like yours can be offered by many, but the important competitive advantage is that the more customers have stored data on your service, the more 'expensive' for them to switch.

What part of your service increases in value the longer someone uses it? Is it the historical data of the customer's own app, or is it the cross-sectional data of apps in other categories? As mentioned above, mixpanel is a good example, so is new relic.

michelleclsunon Turn your 404s into lost children alerts

It is great to see such creative initiative of linking these nuisances in technology to a good cause. Would it be possible to link to the location of the browser for the missing children (or adults) in that area?

michelleclsunon Show HN: A place for stories

Agree with @user24. Are these snippets essentially quotes of interesting articles?

michelleclsunon IOS Maps and China

I am a Hong Kong native and lived in Beijing, and traveled for work in Shenzhen and Shanghai extensively. I agree that the population that can afford an iphone in China is still a small portion. However, I believe a cheaper iPhone with TD-SCDMA may not be a viable solution for Apple to the Chinese market for two reasons.

a) The amount of craze and worship to Apple products in key cities surpasses any reasonable level. People are willing to pay, a mark up of 58% - 98% markup in the grey market in Shenzhen. In fact, there are businesses in Hong Kong that built around hiring cheap labor to line up in Apple Store and carrying the iPhones across the border for a quick turnaround of arbitraging prices. [1]

It took little more than five hours for the first Apple iPhone 5s to go on sale in China after being smuggled across the border from Hong Kong, but supplies were short and prices high.

For anyone able to secure one, the new phone cost HK$5,588 ($720), or the equivalent of around 4,545 yuan, at the Hong Kong Apple store, while they were selling for between 7,500 yuan [$1140] and 9,000 yuan [$1427] in the litter-strewn building in Shenzhen where fake and smuggled phones are often hawked. [2]

b) It is always been Apple's strategy to price high and capture a customer segment with high willingness to pay. The app store revenue has significantly higher share of revenue for fewer app downloads versus android. "..the App Store leads with a revenue share of 71% (compared to 29% for Android) even though total downloads through Google Play accounts for 35% of the total, versus 28% for iOS. * [3]

[1] http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2012/09/smuggled...

[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/21/iphone-5-in-china_n...

[3] http://www.imore.com/ios-app-store-generates-double-google-p...

michelleclsunon Reading Other People's Code

Cool. Thanks again. Also just came across this question on stackexchange http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/165380/how-to...

Quoting part of the top answer here:

""" Here is a partial list:

Use the language all day, every day. Usually this means being full-time employed in the language.

Read all you can about the language. Especially, "best practices" and idioms.

Join a users group to talk with others about the language and what they do with it.

Work with other people's code! There is no faster way to learn what not to do in a language than to have to clean up after someone did something awful.

Support the code you write - every bug becomes a tour of your worst decisions!

Study computer science and languages in general

Learn a very different language. A great compliment to C would be a functional language like Lisp. This will turn the way you think about your procedural language inside out.

Learn to use the frameworks and APIs available for that language.

Take the time to do your own experiments with the language. SICP is not applicable to C, but the attitude of learning a language by testing its limits is a very productive one.

Read the history of the language to learn why it was made the way it is.

Attend conferences to hear the language authors speak, or to hear what industry leaders are doing with the language.

Take a class in the language. """

michelleclsunon Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare

I believe this is not only a Gen Y nightmare, but nightmare for all social media users that are oversharing or lack the time / energy to properly clean up their social media presence.

It's hard to have a public presence to say, >1000 friends on facebook. As a user since 2005 back in college, I witness my peers and my Facebook usage evolve from 'a social network with personal sharing' to a 'bare wall with a few instagram picture uploads / article sharing, and essentially a contact list'. It's sad, but inevitable - how personal can sharing be, when the friends list is over 1000 and some of whom are no longer actively in your life? Of course no one is to blame but the user (myself) that added too many friends. However, this issue is quite common in many users that approach their 3-4th year of using facebook; less personal sharing, more 'contact collecting'.

I wonder if what everyone thinks of a service that helps clean up the social media, or even more broadly, online presence of individuals. www.123people.co.uk tells you webpages/ social media accounts/ pictures/ articles about a person just by typing in first, last name and a region.

With facebook recently opening up email addresses for companies to target their ads (http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/20/facebook-crm-ads/). One can only imagine where our information is shared and sold to corporations.

It is a shuddering thought.

michelleclsunon Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare

The sad thing about it is that, employers most usually deny to explain the reason why an application is denied. It can easily be attributed to 'cultural fit' or 'lack of experience'.

michelleclsunon Reading Other People's Code

I suggest picking a medium-sized open source project in a language of your choice

Thanks. What's the best way to find medium size (what is considered medium sized) open source project? I code mostly in python and have several repos on github/michellesun.

michelleclsunon Reading Other People's Code

This is a great idea. And I think that leads to a broader question I've had.

I completed a 10-week programming course (Hackbright) in SF this summer and am currently waiting for my visa to come through to come back to the Bay Area to start a job at a YC company.

There are lots of resources out there for picking up a language (or coding, to begin with), eg, codecademy, treehouse, udemy, even offline courses like Hackbright, DevBootCamp. Beyond that, what are some of the best ways to go from a programmer to a good programmer?

I find writing code a couple hours a day and working on my personal projects helpful, but only to a certain degree as I feel I am re-using a lot of my existing knowledge (or hitting some kind of roadblock).

Hence, reading more quality codes has been one of the priorities for me to keep up the learning. The major challenge though is to find good code to read. Perhaps a weekly curated "reading list" akin to StartupDigest but for coders, instead of startup related articles, they can be handpicked "codes of the week" on github / other sources? Or, do these things already exist out there?